We Fly The Bellanca Viking

She had a hunkered-down look to her, sitting low and pretty on the tarmac, three-blade prop glistening in the sun, nary a rivet to be seen on her pretty red wings. The two-tone cream and red paint scheme and the swooping side stripe back to the tip of the pointy swept tail made her look like she was moving 200 knots even though standing still on the ground.

On closer inspection, though, one becomes aware of the strutted horizontal tail, the fabric ailerons and flaps, the boxy steel-tube fabric covered fuselage. And the lack of gear doors.

Maybe it won't go 200 knots after all.

N7300V is a 1969 Bellanca Viking. 1969! Woodstock! The 1969 sense of style is fully evident. The cabin has sportscar-like low bucket seats, done up in leather and fabric just like a 1969 Recaro sports car seat. No shoulder harnesses in the airplane! 300 horsepower!

I am there because I maybe want to buy her. But I sure do want to fly her. I have been wanting to fly a Viking for a long time now, to see if the legendary Bellanca control harmony and responsive was real.

So there it was. Paul had just flown the airplane in from Petaluma for this demo flight which Sacramento Aviation had set up for me, the prospective buyer. He hops, out, I hop in left-seat.

We start it up and taxi over for some fuel. Bellancas and 300hp engines seem to like fuel. My first impression is that this airplane taxis very quickly! 1000rpm from 300hp and 3-blade prop really gets the little airplane moving. This might be interesting.

We line up for takeoff. Cleared! I advance the throttle and begin counting the seconds of takeoff roll to myself. In 7 seconds we had passed the 80mph suggested rotation point and are aloft. And climbing near 2000 fpm, the nose seemingly absurdly high at 100mph. Gear up, and 130mph to 140mph yields a much more comfortable cruise climb.

That was a conservatiive takeoff. Back in the late 60's Bellance used to tout this airplanes short-field performance, they even talked of 600 foot takeoff rolls. This required rotating HARD at about 50 mph, way below the airplanes stall speed. while simultaneously adding full flaps. An engine failure in this mode would require an equally HARD push-over to keep flying, and no doubt a very hard"landing". Not for the inexperienced. Thank goodness this is not 1969.

We head East, toward the foothills south of Placerville. I've always wanted to see my little ranch from the air, so this is what we do today. IFR. I Follow Roads, in this case California 16 (Jackson Highway), then E16 up Shenandoah Valley past the eighteen wineries there, then follow the Cosumnes River to the area of my home. There it is! I wag the wings at the horses.

Now some air work. A Bellanca Viking has a for-real 100 degree per second roll rate! The fastest ailerons probably of any similar four-place airplane. This is a much faster roll rate than even the Decathlon with aileron spades that I fly for fun! Vikings have been found doing aerobatics at airshows; there was once a female Bellance company pilot who used to show off the airplanes in airshows in the 1970s; today there is a pilot called the Avenger (real name Jeremy Reilly) down in Texas who does a Bellanca Viking act. How is this possible? Ask Bob Hoover. When you want to do aerobatics in a certified airplane you get it registered in the "experimental exhibition" category, and taken out of the "normal" category. Once you do this you can never fly the airplane normal category again. Not until it is very seriously torn apart and inspected, piece by piece, by the FAA. Might as well buy a new airplane at this point.

You can see the mental forces at work on me here.

I wrote a $5,000 good-faith deposit check on the Bellanca. Plan is to fly it to Screaming Eagle Aviation in Santa Paula (the west coast Bellance specialists) for a good pre-purchase inspection. We shall see.

She is a good IFR airplane, with an Apollo moving-map GPS.